I Rebuke Thee!

There's a great scene in Broadcast News where Albert Brooks is trying to convince a dubious Holly Hunter that William Hurt is the devil. "What do you think he's going to look like if he's around?" he says. "No one's going to be taken in by a guy with a long, red pointy tail. He will be attractive. He'll never deliberately hurt a living thing. He'll just bit by bit lower our standards where they're important. Just coax along flash over substance. Just a tiny little bit." Ladies and gentleman, by this same litmus test I am here to tell you that if Jessica Simpson is not Satan, she is most certainly one of his handmaidens.

Space lizard?

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I've always been onto Mistress Beelzebub. I don't trust anyone who wants my respect simply because she wears a cross between her insistent knockers and wouldn't bang her boyfriend until she'd gotten him to say, "I do." She worked some evil spell on that big, bumbling hubby of hers—and he can come over and cry on my shoulder about it any time he wants—but she'll not stop me from my sworn duty of vanquishing her further encroachment on America. I thought for sure ABC had done the job for me by airing that clearly terrifying Nick and Jessica variety show that had them singing show tunes and cavorting with Jewel and Mr. T; Jessica's demonic powers are such that the pair—Nick and Jessica, that is—will be coming at us again this winter in a Christmas special (as if the holidays aren't difficult enough).

Never underestimate the resources of hell. People tried to dismiss Jessica after she infamously puzzled over why there was tuna in a can of Chicken of the Sea on MTV's Newlyweds. Was she forever shunned as an insipid pop tart? No. Girlfriend went on Oprah and Leno, and started the spin on her image that the masses and most of the media have been buying to a stunning degree: She's ingeniously dumb, see! Oh, she's dumb like a fox, that one! She's so dumb she's smart! A Details cover story on poor Nick went so far as to compare Jessica's supposedly cagey, mind-numbing vacuousness to Ronald Reagan's, and joked that Simpson was busy casually solving the Middle Eastern conflict while doing her nails. The article also quoted little Miss Einstein as saying that she wouldn't be happy getting herself into just any old movie because "it's not just about seeing myself on the big screen—it's about building the foundation for a long-term career." Her appetite will not be satisfied until we're all at her feet.

And it won't stop there if we don't do something now. Despite the fact that Jessica singing has an alarming resemblance to those aliens in V—you know, that '80s miniseries about the kindly visitors who were actually nefarious space lizards swallowing whole guinea pigs on the side?—MTV has recently decided to enlist the services of her younger replicant sister, Ashlee, to further serenade us in her own reality series. If indeed everyone is allotted 15 minutes of fame, I demand that we band together now and put Jessica and any other little Simpson on the way at 14:50 and counting: 51, 52, 53 . . .